A Changing Relationship with Thanksgiving

 Thanksgiving has been my favorite holiday after becoming an adult.  Cancer and Covid have worked to change my relationship with the holiday.  

Of all the holidays we get in this country, Thanksgiving has struck me as the most honest and incorruptible.  Christmas, which follows a month later, is too commercialized. The “Days” holidays, Memorial Day, Labor Day, Veterans’ Day, are merely extended weekends, with one or two items on the news trying mightily to remind us the original reason for creating the holiday.  

Thanksgiving though is what it is because what it presumes to celebrate is bound in the manner in which it is usually celebrated.  Getting together with family and friends, enjoying a meal together, being happy and, yes, thankful, that you have food on the table, loved ones to share it with, and a place of shelter in which to enjoy both.  

For years after I began living on my own, I looked forward to Thanksgiving.  The chance to travel to either Arkansas, where my parents live, and where one sister and her boys are close by in Oklahoma, or North Carolina, where another sister, her kids, and cousins lived, where would gather, eat, play games, and enjoy each others’ company.  

I love my family.  And the holiday was the time I reminded myself just how much I did.  It was an unadulterated joy.  

The relationship with the holiday started to get rocky, I guess it was about eight or nine years ago now, when the eldest of my two sisters got lung cancer.  

A pattern was born out of that first Thanksgiving after I had been told that she had a lump the size of a baseball in one of her lungs.  I got the news several weeks earlier, in September or October.  I flew out to North Carolina to stay with her that week.  Mom and Day, Kathleen, my youngest sister, plus either both or one of her sons would drive out to join us.  We went shopping, watched movies, ate a lot of food, played with her dogs.  And, we talked about what has going on with Virginia.  What the doctors were telling her.  How she felt.  The issues she was having with the insurance.  

My family didn’t shy away from talking about it.  We didn’t pretend nothing was going on.  We’ve never been like that.  We had questions.  We were concerned.  We addressed our questions and concerns openly.  Cancer may have been an uninvited, unwelcome guest, but he didn’t ignore it nor pretend it wasn’t there.  I remember that first Thanksgiving my sister being very positive about her prognosis.  She was going to beat it, she told us.  Even though it was a type of cancer so rare that the hospital treating her had only see one previous instance of it in the previous ten years.  She was certain.  She was going to have surgery followed by radiation treatments in a few weeks.  She was going to beat it after that.  

That was the pattern that the holiday followed for the next five or six years.  My sister had her surgery and/or treatment.  For months after we would get encouraging news about her progress.  Around August or September we’d start making plans to visit at Thanksgiving, to celebrate her recovery.  Then, around October, there’d be a set-back.  The first October after that first Thanksgiving with Cancer as a guest it was the discovery that her cancer had metastasized into her lymph nodes, into her left hip, as well as a small lump on her aorta.  It was decided that she’d need to go on chemo-therapy since the tumors, particularly the one on the aorta, were inoperable.

We got together that year as we had before.  We did not welcome Cancer, who had decided to show up again, uninvited and unwelcome, but we didn’t shun it either.  We talked about it.  We gave my sister support.  She was going to beat it, she told us.  We gave her our love.

And so it went for the next several years.  A reminder of Cancer’s persistence.  A Thanksgiving where we gathered close to her.  A new therapy being chosen and tried.  Signs of promise.  An October where that promise was broken and a fresh reminder of Cancer’s intractable nature.  A Thanksgiving together, talking, eating, support, love.  

As time went on my sister ceased to declare that she would beat it.  More time was spent trying to figure out what the next treatment would be as they were chosen and found to be ineffective.  And fewer and fewer news of promising results were received.  

I remember the day when talking to my sister over the phone and hearing that one of her doctors had recommended she go on “palliative care.”  She didn’t know what type of treatment that was.  When I told her, she replied, “Well, I don’t think I like that.”  I told her that I didn’t like it either.  

The end was ugly.  Featuring a husband that forgot the meaning of his marriage vows.  My parents moving in with my niece taking my sister with them.  A late night argument ending with my sister leaving with that husband.  And finally, an afternoon phone call from the hospital telling my parents that Virginia had died a couple of hours before after being brought there early that morning.  

This all happened two weeks before Thanksgiving.  The day before my uncle, my mom’s older brother and last surviving sibling, passed away from kidney failure.  I attended his memorial the week before flying out to North Carolina to join my family.  The day before Thanksgiving we drove to the sea to cast my sister’s ashes into the ocean, her final wish.  

We didn’t get together for Thanksgiving the next year.  In October, while speaking to my dad over the phone, he declared that they weren’t going to do anything for Thanksgiving that year.  Maybe Christmas.  Not Thanksgiving.  I said, “Ok.”  I got it.  We’d had enough.  Thanksgiving was…  Tainted, in a way.  We needed a break from it.  

But we did get together the year after.  And the year after that.  We gathered at my niece’s house.  We played games, watched movies, ate a lot of food, we talked a lot, about my sister and about other things.  I am weeping now, remembering how happy I was to be with my family.  It was almost, almost the same as it had always been.  Thanksgiving was back.  And I was grateful.  

This year, it’s not.  Not for me, anyway.  Not the way it’s “supposed” to be.  Another visitor with a “C” name, this time “Covid” has come to visit.  My parents called me before the end of October to ask me if I could join them in Arkansas this year.  I told them I’d think about it and let them know.  That weekend I started coughing.  I got a runny nose.  It was just a winter cold, I thought.  I’d had them before.  I didn’t have a temperature.  I could still taste my food.  It was just a cough and a runny nose.  Nothing else. 

But, I didn’t want to take a chance.  The thought of going through airports, with people from all over, maybe even places where they thought it was all a hoax, didn’t wear masks, or stay socially distant…  I didn’t want to chance it.  I told my parents the following week I wouldn’t be coming out.  They were understanding.  I still felt bad.  

Every Thanksgiving I do spend some time, usually in my journal, writing about things I am glad to have in my life, things I am thankful for even if, in an objective way, I’m not sure if anyone is out there to thank for them.  Even if it’s just an accident of birth and circumstances that I have them.  This year, because of what I now associate with Thanksgiving from my experience over the recent years, my thankfulness seems more…  Relative.  More conditional.  

For instance, I am thankful to have a job, ESPECIALLY since so many people have lost theirs due to Covid.  I am happy to have good health, BUT wonder if what appears to be good health is simply being asymptomatic.  I have a sheltering place to sleep and food in the kitchen for when I’m hungry, but if things get worse they could be gone as well.  

And, I’m thankful for the family I have.  Even if I can’t be with them this year because I want to make sure I don’t bring them more than my love and support.  I won’t be alone.  I have friends I’ll be seeing, in a very small gathering at their home.  I’m thankful for that invitation, even though it would be quite the same as what Thanksgiving usually is for me.  

But that is what Thanksgiving is right now.  Not quite the same as before.  But still is special for me.